Lawmakers narrowly approved the bill to repeal part of a law enacted during the Red Scare of the 1940s and ’50s when fear that communists were trying to infiltrate and overthrow the U.S. government was rampant.

In fact, America was at war with communism. It was called the Cold War. What many feared was that it would become a nuclear war with communist Russia. That was not an irrational fear.

The bill now goes to the Senate.

It has not yet been passed by the Californian Senate.

It would eliminate part of the law that allows public employees to be fired for being a member of the Communist Party.

Employees could still be fired for being members of organizations they know advocate for overthrowing the government by force or violence.

The bill updates an outdated provision in state law, said Assemblyman Rob Bonta, the San Francisco Bay Area Democrat who authored the measure.

Some Assembly Republicans said the Cold War-era law should not be changed.

A law made to deal with such a silly old bugbear of an imagined threat, AP would have us feel, is surely obsolete; yet – Oh dear! – not all the elected members of the Californian Assembly are for welcoming communists into government employment:

Assemblyman Randy Voepel, a Southern California Republican who fought in the Vietnam War, said communists in North Korea and China are “still a threat”. [Our emphasis]

The quotation marks might be intended to convey, “What a ninny he is!” But the communist states of North Korea and China are still a threat.

Finally, to give a boost to your mirth at what one Republican ninny had to say, AP quotes another (because no one should accuse AP of being one-sided in its reporting):

“This bill is blatantly offensive to all Californians,” said Assemblyman Travis Allen, a Republican who represents a coastal district in Southern California. “Communism stands for everything that the United States stands against.”

Yes. And whatever the United States stands against, “the Resistance” – aka the Democratic Party – is for.

On Tuesday February 21, 2017, the California State Senate memorialized one of its members who died last year: Tom Hayden.

Who was Tom Hayden? He was a leader of the resistance movement against America fighting Communism in Vietnam.

In their 1989 book Destructive Generation, Peter Collier and David Horowitz write:

“We created the most massive resistance to a war in the nation’s history,” [Tom Hayden] boasts. Yet the corollary never occurs to him: that this resistance, which caused the defeat of America, resulted in a monster regime that, more than a decade after the end of the [Vietnam] war, still torments its own people, driving them deeper into poverty and diminishing their freedoms through Marxist repression and imperial conquest.

California State Senator Janet Nguyen was born in Saigon, Vietnam about a year after the city fell. Her family came to the United States as refugees when she was five, and was raised in Southern California. She is the first Vietnamese-American state legislator, representing a heavily Vietnamese area of Orange County.

She holds, as do many of the people she represents, strong opinions about those who gave aid and comfort to the Communists during the Vietnam War, including former State Sen. Tom Hayden, who died last year. So when the California State Senate memorialized Hayden Tuesday, she stepped out of the chambers rather than having to listen to her colleagues sing Hayden’s praises:

“He was one of the great visionaries. He was a guy with a lot of courage,” [John] Burton, the California Democratic Party Chairman, said.

“He was a maverick. He was an independent thinker. He was an intellectual. He was a true progressive,” said current Senate President Pro Tem Kevin de León (D-Los Angeles). “He dedicated his life to the betterment of our state and our great country through the pursuit of peace, justice and equity.”

Today [February 24, 2017], Nguyen attempted to make a speech giving a “different historical perspective” about Hayden, but was shut down by Senate leadership. First her microphone was cut, then she was repeatedly told to sit down, and then finally, Sen. Ricardo Lara (D-Bell Gardens) had her led out of the chambers by the Sergeant at Arms. … Someone [told] Lara to have her removed, and he declined, saying, “that only makes it more dramatic.” Finally, State Sen. Bill Monning (D-Carmel) interrupted and said she was “out of order” in her remarks. Nguyen kept talking until she was led out of the chamber.

The misogyny and blatant hypocrisy displayed by Senate Dems in this matter is stunning. When Senator Elizabeth Warren (D-MA) attempted to smear Jeff Sessions’ character in a floor speech and was shut down, “She persisted” became an instant rallying cry among feminists and leftists, who defended her right to speak even in contravention of the rules. They accused Sen. McConnell of misogyny. But it’s okay to shut this woman down, because she’s a Republican. She doesn’t have the same rights Sen. Warren has.

Leftists label anyone who wants to come to this country, especially illegally, as a “refugee” worthy of our handouts and of end-runs around the rule of law. But this refugee, Nguyen, cannot be allowed to speak – because her ideas differ from what they want to hear.

Nguyen’s staff tried to clear the speech with Senate leadership beforehand, but were given the run-around. First they told her to just post the speech online. Then they suggested she speak after adjournment, but when Nguyen checked with parliamentary rules procedures she was told that was against the rules.

She told the Los Angeles Times:

“I was told I cannot speak on the issue at all.”

But she persisted. And when she did, Senate President Kevin de Leon’s chief of staff accused her of “wanting to make a scene” and that she “got what she wanted.”

She got what she wanted? She wanted to make a scene? Next thing you know they’ll be calling her an hysterical broad.

Sen. Nguyen did post her entire statement on her Senate website, a portion of which reads:

Members, I recognize today in memory of the million of Vietnamese and the hundreds of thousands of Vietnamese refugees who died seeking freedom and democracy. I recognize that on Tuesday you had an opportunity to honor Senator Tom Hayden. With all due respect, I would like to offer another historical perspective.

On Tuesday, instead of participating, I chose to step out of the chamber out of respect to his family, his friends and to you. In contrast to your comments on Tuesday, I want to share what Senator Hayden meant to me and to the over 500,000 Vietnamese Americans who call California their home, as well as to the over 1 million Vietnamese Americans across the United States.

Mr. Hayden sided with a communist government that enslaved and/or killed millions of Vietnamese, including members of my own family. Mr. Hayden’s actions are viewed by many as harmful to democratic values and hateful towards those who sought the very freedoms on which this nation is founded.

Instead of representing her constituents and speaking up against Communist coddling, she’s supposed to listen to the man in charge and listen when he tells her to sit down and shut up? I don’t think so.

Shame on you, Senator Lara.

The scene of the silencing of California State Senator Janet Nguyen exemplifies communism in power.

Why do so many Americans like communism after all the unmitigated suffering it has caused over the last hundred years?

Collier and Horowitz offer an explanatory answer:

How does the Left maintain its belief against the the crushing weight of its failures in the past? By recycling its innocence, which allows it to be born again in its utopian faith. The utopianism of the Left is a secular religion (as the vogue of “liberation theology” attests), its promise of an earthly kingdom of heaven. However sordid Leftist practice may be, defending Leftist ideals is, for the true believer, tantamount to defending the ideals of humanity itself. To protect the faith is the highest calling of the radical creed. The more the evidence weighs against the belief, the more noble the act of believing becomes.

Nearly 46,000 Pennsylvania Democrats have switched to Republicans since the beginning of the year. …

There’s even a title for the movement. It’s called “Ditch and Switch” and calls for lifelong Democrats to abandon the party, register Republican, and help ensure Trump’s place in the general election. …

The numbers are similar in other states as well. The paper says in Massachusetts, as many as 20,000 Democrats have gone from blue-to-red this year with Trump cited as a primary reason.

Maybe because they think that if Trump is the Republican nominee, Hillary will win the race for the White House?

That argument will probably be made by some. But it isn’t very convincing if one looks at who the defectors are.

And in Ohio, as many as 1,000 blue collar workers have promised to switch parties and vote for Trump.

Numbers show that some Republicans are also switching to the Democratic party, but nowhere near the numbers that are switching to Republican.

About 20 percent of likely Democratic voters say they would buck the party and vote for Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump in a general election, according to a new poll.

The willingness of some Democrats to change sides could be a major problem for Democratic front-runner Hillary Clinton this fall.

The new figures were released by Mercury Analytics, a research company with clients that include MSNBC and Fox News, as the result of an online poll and dial-test of Trump’s first campaign ad.

A smaller number of Republicans say they’d vote for Clinton — about 14 percent.

BUT … there are powerful Republicans who are desperate to stop Trump becoming their candidate.

Not surprisingly, of course.

Trump is the avenger of the conservative base against the powerful Republicans who have betrayed them over and over again; those who have connived with the Democrats to let the Obama administration implement its “progressive” – ie. redistributive, unconstitutional, anti-American – agenda.

Now they are conspiring to discount and overrule the democratic choice of Republican voters whose only power is each his one vote.

Billionaires, tech CEOs and top members of the Republican establishment flew to a private island resort off the coast of Georgia this weekend for the American Enterprise Institute’s annual World Forum, according to sources familiar with the secretive gathering.

The main topic at the closed-to-the-press confab? How to stop Republican front-runner Donald Trump.

Philip Anschutz, the billionaire GOP donor whose company owns a stake in Sea Island, was also there, along with Democratic Rep. John Delaney, who represents Maryland.

Note well. Democratic Representative John Delaney, was there. And no doubt there were more Democrats discussing the future of the Republican Party with the colluding Republicans.

And the worst is yet to come:

Arthur Sulzberger, the publisher of The New York Times, was there too, a Times spokeswoman confirmed.

There we have it. The publisher of the New York Times. Was there too. If American conservatism has an American arch enemy, more dangerous because more lasting than even Obama and his gang, it is surely the New York Times.

Let’s amend that. If America has an American arch enemy, it is surely the New York Times; historically, and still now, under the captaincy of Arthur Sulzberger.

As the secret meeting of these plotters – scheming to frustrate the will of a very large number of the people – is now secret no longer, let those who doubt that Trump has a mission worth supporting ponder that well.

We’re not just wondering what the Republican Party stands for. We’re also wondering why it exists at all.

An entirely different conservative party is badly needed to oppose the evil Left. (It would be splendid if a conservative party came to power that would exclude religion from its political thinking, but to wish for that – we fully realize – is to be far too unrealistic.)

It is almost unbelievable how badly Congressional Republicans have botched their opposition to President Obama’s illegal executive amnesty and the funding of the Department of Homeland Security. The House, under John Boehner’s direction, did the right thing: it passed a bill that fully funded DHS, but barred spending to implement the amnesty that has now been declared illegal by a federal court. The action then moved to the Senate, where Majority Leader Mitch McConnell tried repeatedly to bring the House measure to the floor for a vote. Four times, the Democrats filibustered the DHS funding bill.

As a result of the Democrats’ filibuster, DHS was in danger of running out of money. That put Republicans in a strong position. All they had to do was … nothing. If they didn’t blink, pressure on the Democrats to fund DHS would prove irresistible. It’s not for nothing the voters gave the GOP a majority, right?

Instead, Mitch McConnell backed off. He gave in to Harry Reid’s demands, even though Reid was surely bluffing, and the Senate passed a “clean” DHS funding bill that did nothing to block the illegal amnesty. That put the House in an untenable position. With the clock ticking down to the last hours before DHS ran out of money, it was now Republicans–not Democrats–who were standing in the way of funding the Department.

Having been sold out by the Senate, House Republicans bowed to the inevitable. John Boehner tried to pass a three-week funding extension, but didn’t have the votes. At the last possible moment, the House fell back to a seven-day extension, with Democrats providing the needed margin of support. The seven-day extension can have no possible purpose other than to give Republicans an opportunity to beat an orderly retreat.

If the Republicans wanted to arm their enemies, they couldn’t have done a better job. This is the New York Times triumphant account:

Republicans vowing to govern effectively as a congressional majority failed a fundamental test Friday, when House leaders managed to narrowly pass only a seven-day funding extension to avert a partial shutdown of the Department of Homeland Security just hours before money was to run out.

That’s a news story, not an opinion column. But it’s hard to blame the Democrats for exulting. They were in a corner; they had no cards to play; the voters have ejected them from the majority in both chambers; their objective was to keep alive a patently illegal program that had already been declared so by a federal judge. And the Republicans still couldn’t manage to pull out a victory.

Politics is like anything else: if you want to succeed, you have to be good at it. As best I can tell, Washington Republicans aren’t.